Awesome Coach of the Week: Richard Lawrence

We’ve known Richard for years and worked with him on numerous occasions, mainly on one of the largest agile transition projects in Europe. Through this work, we came to value him as an Awesome Coach and chose to appreciate his contributions to the Agile Coaching community by honoring him with our first ever Awesome Coach of the Week award.

ATDD

Richard’s most obvious contribution to the Agile world has been to the methods and tools of ATDD. He contributed to Cucumber and is the creator of Cuke4Nuke.

An Agile Family

Richard and his wife use a lot of agile principles and practices in their boys’ education (e.g. multi-level rolling planning, eliminating waste). Traveling abroad when Richard works far from home, they teach the boys using a backlog and let them self-organise their tasks on a board. They use ideas from the Theory of Constraints to resolve conflicts and make decisions in their family ( their boys even use tools like the evaporating cloud to solve conflicts among one another).

Theory of Constraints

Talking about ToC— pair coaching with Richard is hard. Using the ToC thinking tools is so natural to him that sometimes you don’t notice he flips into it. You feel like entering a completely different world, making it hard to step in if you have less practice yourself. We’re finding that we’re using ToC more and more...

Awesome Coach of the Week

This is why we think Richard Lawrence is an Awesome Coach. If you can add an awesome experience with Richard, please do so in the comments. We’ll honour one Coach a week, starting now. Suggestions welcome!